Star Trek: Renegades
by Jonathan Nichols
Summary: This is what I would do if I had the chance to develop a new series for the franchise like that would ever happen. It takes place a few years after Voyager ended. The Borg have won but a band of hearty vagabounds struggle on.


RATING: T

STAR TREK: RENEGADES

NEW YORK CITY20 YEARS AFTER THE END OF _ST: VOYAGER_

The Borg have won. After so many years of threats and drones in monotone that "resistance is futile," they finally returned to Sector 001…and took everything.

Lt. Jonathan Diamond was there at humanity's last stand above the Earth, manning his post as helm officer onboard the Federation Starship, _USS Andoria_. The chaos on the bridge that day was unimaginable. His captain would bark an order to alter course in front of the oncoming Borg cubes and Diamond would frantically comply. As soon as one order had been carried out, three more came out of the captain's mouth. The commanding officer was rapidly losing his ability to make rational decisions and everyone on the bridge knew it. Yet as Diamond and the others watched the tiny exploding suns onscreen that were the other Federation ships of the line winking out of existence, no one could begrudge their leader a lapse into irrationality.

Every night dreams of that day returned to haunt him…and it always ended with the sudden and violent shudder of the _Andoria_ as the Borg tractor beam locked securely upon them. The call to abandon ship was given shortly after that and Lt. Diamond drifted home in an escape pod.

And that is when the Borg brought an end to all things…all things that were not Borg, anyway. Since that time, Jonathan Diamond spent most of his days in the basement of an abandoned tenement building in what used to be the Alphaville section of New York City. Along with a loosely connected underground of stragglers and survivors, he eked out a living directly underneath the pasty-white noses of the Borg.

He shared the basement with three others. There was Kayla Springer, a gentle young woman who had led the life of an engineer before the dark times. Thanks to her expertise and to found technology, Springer was able to throw together a device that generated a low-intensity masking field that hid their presence from the Borg. Truth to tell, Kayla was not so certain whether it was her craftiness or the Borg's indifference that had kept them safely in hiding for so long. Regardless, the technical work kept her from crying for her husband who was either dead or assimilated (what was the difference?) That's what she told them anyway, but Diamond knew differently for he could still hear her muffled sobs in the night.

There was Ka'Leel, a Romulan doctor who had been part of a diplomatic delegation to the Federation from the Romulan Star Empire at exactly the wrong time. He had been trapped on Earth and separated from his comrades during the Borg attack and eventually fell in with Jonathan and Kayla. Though it was beneficial to have a medical professional trapped with you, Ka'Leel was distinctly lacking in the realm of bedside manner ("this is going to hurt a very great deal.") Without hesitation or even the flutter of eyelids, Ka'Leel explained to his fellow survivors that his impetus for studying medicine was to help him become a more efficient assassin. Sometimes, Diamond wondered if living with the Borg might be preferable to entrapment in a decrepit basement with the somber and morose "Dr. Death."

Finally, there was Rona Strond, an Orion slave woman who had led most of her life as a commercial sex worker. Jonathan deeply regretted ever having sampled her luscious green body, but desperation and despondency sometimes create physical needs beyond those of immediate survival. Rona was acerbic, tough, and went to great pains to paint herself as a sensuous woman that could sate any man (or woman)'s needs. Kayla could see through it though and knew that Rona just wanted someone to tell her she was worthwhile. Perhaps that is why the two of them never saw eye-to-eye.

One of Diamond's favorite ways to whittle away the day was to sit and stare in the antique and torn La-Z-Boy chair that he had found the recesses of the basement. His eyes would focus on his wet laundry that hung from the exposed piping overhead until the damp cloth would take on a life of its own. Sometimes, if it were a square or rectangular shaped garment, the clothing would dissolve in Diamond's mind until it formed the plaque that had once hung beside the turbolift on the bridge of the _Andoria_.

"To go forward in peace to benefit all living things." Jonathan had the words of the plaque committed to memory. Fat lot of good that mission statement did for anyone he knew. It damned his best friend Cory who was captured and assimilated early on and Diamond was all but certain that it had been useless for his poor grandmother who was somewhere in Ohio…or at least she had been until she had most likely been assimilated or killed in the name of efficiency. More than that, the credo had failed him. Diamond had trained all his life to serve in Starfleet and where did it get him? A life sentence underneath a crumbling and forgotten building. In the end, the Starfleet manifesto had been a paper tiger in the face of the inevitable.

A reverie such as that one was broken for Jonathan one day when Rona returned from the outside world. Periodically they would all take turns going on reconnaissance runs to determine the state of their surroundings and whether or not the Borg had any interest in the ruins that they called home.

"It's hot outside. I wonder how the Borg have taken to genuine New York summers," Rona reported as she took an unnecessarily long period of time to towel the sweat from her areas of exposed skin. She then hurled the cloth at Kayla, who was seated and busily working over a circuit panel. "Wash this."

"Look, I'm sorry if you…" Springer demurely countered in the face of the jade spitfire.

"Save it, powderpuff! I don't need your pity!" barked Rona.

"Obviously you don't," Kayla said, returning to work on her circuit board and looking all the world like a little girl attempting to ignore a bully. "You have quite enough of your own."

_Damn!_ thought Jonathan. _Closest I've ever seen Kayla come to giving Rona a comeback!_

"Now you wait just one…" Rona growled, coming in for the attack.

"No, you wait!" Kayla stood up, but trembled visibly. "Do you think that living like this has been easy on any of us? The last thing we need is you barking and storming around because you feel sorry for yourself!"

"I am going to tear your…"

"Enough!" Diamond hollered as he rose from the La-Z-Boy, entirely unconcerned that his pants were drying and he was only in his underwear. He placed himself between the two women as a physical barrier to their escalating conflict. "I got two people I'm feeling sorry for right now, and that's me and me and I can't do that if you broads keep making all this damned racket!"

"Oh let them go," whined Ka'Leel as he walked out from behind what used to be the apartment building's heating unit. "Last time I saw a catfight this arousing I had to pay two Arcturian whores for it."

"All I know is you two have been going at it to the point of driving all of us crazy!" Diamond said, ignoring Ka'Leel and continuing his rant. Though she disdained being lectured to, Rona was reminded just how much she enjoyed Jonathan's brusqueness. "At this point I might as well turn myself over to the Borg! At least that way things'll be calm and relaxing!"

"Look, we've all got cabin fever. I think it's time we got out of here, Jonathan," Rona argued.

"Oh and what exactly do you have in mind, my voluptuous friend? I understand that the Four Seasons Hotel is currently without vacancy," Ka'Leel chided in response.

"I'm talking about the transporter that I found!" Rona said with the undertone of wanting to rend the Romulan's head from his neck.

The transporter. They had long suspected that the Borg had developed a transporter device capable of beaming people and materials across extremely vast distances, possibly even between planets. According to what they could gather from their recon runs, the device was most likely housed in what used to be Madison Square Garden.

"It's too risky," Kayla spoke. "Suppose there is no transporter? Or even if there is, what if it beams us into absolutely nowhere?"

"Then it will be your big chance to get away from it all," Ka'Leel sneered sarcastically.

"What the hell?" Diamond finally shrugged as he picked up one of the Borg phasers that they had confiscated before. "It's not like I got a morbid fear of dying. Come on."

"Mr. Diamond?" Ka'Leel asked. "You may wish to put your pants on first."

The sky over New York had been turned a permanent gray from the smelting fires of the Borg that continuously spat toxins and pollutants into the atmosphere. One had difficulty distinguishing a building in New York from a side of one of a Borg cube. From what Diamond understood, the same could be said now of the Statue of Liberty (or should it now be "The Statue of Assimilation?")

What used to be the streets were now filled with concrete rubble, discarded metal, and mementos of an ended age. The four from the basement made their way through these debris-strewn paths, ever alert for their adversaries.

"I don't like this," Kayla whispered as her eyes darted to every corner and every crevice that was about them. "We're bound to run into them."

"Fine with me," Rona commented as she knocked debris out of her way.

"Yeah, well don't get cocky. Just remember what they did to everyone we know," Kayla said.

"Oh, I do." Diamond said as he double-checked his phaser.

"Hush. The Garden's just up ahead," Rona pointed out. "And there's five of the Borg's finest standing outside of it."

The Orion woman was indeed accurate. The telltale, black bodysuits encasing alabaster flesh were discernable against the steel-hued entrance doors of the building. The Borg stood motionless, save for the mechanical movements of their heads as they scanned the surrounding neighborhood.

"Jonathan? You want the first shot, baby?" Rona whispered seductively.

"Don't mind if I do," he agreed.

Diamond let fly a blast from his phaser and Rona Strond rapidly followed suit. Two Borg fell, unprepared to counter blasts from weapons of Borg design. Ka'Leel preferred a more tactical approach, skulking around and then jumping out and tackling one of them from behind so that he might run the point of an old fashioned medical scalpel directly through its throat. Rona seemed to admire this tactic and imitated it, knocking one of the Borg down, tearing off one of the technological components of its head and then repeatedly bashing its cranium into a rock. Of course in this kind of rage, she was oblivious to the fifth and final Borg turning towards her. Fortunately for her, a short range EMP burst that had emanated from one of Kayla Springer's innovations suddenly shorted out all of its electrical components. Rona could not help but be grateful for once that Kayla never could harbor a grudge.

"Thank you," the Orion said to her, begrudgingly.

"You're welcome," the human said out of politeness.

"Well let's not start stroking each other just yet," the dark cloud that was Ka'Leel rained. "Five dusted Borg do not a victory make."

"Will you quit talking backwards!" Diamond said with a whispered shout. "It freaks me the hell out!"

Ka'Leel tossed the Borg head that he had just severed and followed his compatriots into the building. Soon, the transporter was found, activated, and the four of them beamed into parts unknown…

"Welcome to Mars," Jonathan Diamond said after taking a moment to ascertain their surroundings. The four found themselves inside a metal expanse that Diamond knew from experience to be the Starfleet hangar facilities on the red planet of Mars…with a few Borg modifications. They stepped down from the transporter platform and looked about, disoriented.

"Great. Now what?" Rona asked.

"How the hell should I know?" countered Diamond. "It's been an improvisation pulled from out of my ass up until this point and I can't tell ya what comes next."

"Federation fugitives…" a mechanical voice warbled through the air, devoid of all emotion.

"Aw nuts," Jonathan cursed himself for giving their adversaries the set-up with his last comment. A number of Borg had appeared in the hangar.

"You will lower your weapons and surrender to service the Collective."

Diamond let loose with a blast from his phaser, but it was blocked effortlessly by a personal shield generated around his target Borg.

"They've already adapted," commented Ka'Leel. "The Collective's computer system knows everything we know now."

"Powderpuff, I hope to hell you've got some juice left in that gizmo of yours," Rona said in a whispered prayer to Kayla Springer.

Springer's arms were the only body parts among them that dared to move. Slowly, she fingered the pulse generator and depressed the firing button. The device exhausted itself, sending out an EMP burst that dropped each of the newly arrived Borg to the hangar's metal floor.

"That was the last of it," a cautious Kayla said of her EMP invention. "And even if it weren't, I seriously doubt we'd get away with that a third time."

"Yeah? Well, run and it won't matter!" Diamond urged.

And run the four of them did, straight down a corridor and into another area of the hangar complex, one that was actually housing spaceships.

"A Borg scout ship?" Ka'Leel said in disbelief to Diamond as they stood before the small Borg vessel.

"Like I said, an improvisation pulled directly out of my ass," Jonathan reminded as he pulled himself into the hatchway that led into the Borg scout ship.

Once inside, Diamond and Springer squandered a precious five minutes in a session of musical chairs while trying to determine exactly what control did what. Eventually the antigrav controls were located and the scout ship hovered into a gentle glide before soaring upward and through the thin atmosphere of Mars and deep into space.

"Where exactly are we?" Rona asked.

"On a course towards Saturn, it would seem," Dr. Ka'Leel said as he glanced over Diamond's shoulder.

"Figured with all the rings, moons and debris, they might have a tough time coming after us," Jonathan said, explaining his rationale.

"Wonderful," Rona Strond commented as she watched the stars of space streak past on the viewer. "Right about now, the Borg Collective is noticing that one of their scout ships has been ripped off and that will lead us to…where exactly?"

No one answered her. But then again, she didn't expect them to.

"There's a Borg cube approaching," Kayla said with a tremor in her voice.

"Well then find which one of these things will put us into warp," Diamond urged as he frantically pored over the entirely alien flight controls. The lights dimmed and then switched off. The engines shut down and the spaceship drifted forward for a few kilometers by the sheer virtue of momentum. The air grew still and silence clenched ship's interior within its jaws.

"The Collective," Ka'Leel said, his head craning nervously around the vessel. "They've deactivated the entire scout."

"Guess you should've seen this coming, huh sport?" Rona asked as she began to rub Jonathan's shoulders. He knocked the Orion's hands aside and stood up…for want of anything at all better to do.

A lurch that was altogether too grim and familiar for Jonathan Diamond rocked the entire stolen vessel. The Borg cube had them in a tractor beam and was drawing them inexorably towards their rendezvous with assimilation.

"And the worst part about all of this?" Ka'Leel offered with a dark smirk. "They deactivated the ship and left us with about two hours of breathable air. Least that they could do would be to allow us to pass out. But then, I wouldn't give them that comfort, so why should they? What magnificent bastards, our adversaries. We who are about to die, salute you!"

"The anti-matter pods," Kayla said abruptly cutting off Dr. Death's soliloquy-in-the-making. "Jonny, help me dislodge the scout's anti-matter pods!"

Jonny Diamond cursed under his breath in bewilderment but followed the petite blonde regardless. Once in the back of the ship, Springer explained that the scout's anti-matter pods could be ejected and the tractor beam locked onto them instead of the ship. After shrugging and giving the Terran engineer a dumb look, Diamond helped her search for the ejector mechanism.

Kayla Springer was not wrong. The discarded anti-matter units from the ship's engines fell away from the stolen Borg craft and into the path of the tractor beam, thus tricking the beam into locking onto the other object. Mindlessly, the pods were drawn in and brought into contact with the Borg cube, setting off a detonation that blew a gaping hole into its side and hurled the scout ship away uncontrollably.

Rona cried out as she was flung into the bulkhead by the sudden and violent heave. She fell to the floor, clutching her left arm and grimacing in terrible pain. Elsewhere, Springer and Diamond fought valiantly to bring the ship (which was ever so conveniently shaped like a brick) into some kind of "controlled fall" as it pitched into the methane-laden atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon: Titan.

But as the hull temperature soared and sweat covered Diamond's brow in what he was absolutely certain were going to be the last moments of his life, his mind felt astonishment; intellectual curiosity as to why his ears were not hearing a final roar as the ship plowed into the reddish surface of Titan, but rather the screech of metal rending against metal.

Recovery came slowly, but all four pairs of hands were eventually accounted for. The Doctor brought himself over to Rona, who was still trying to hide the fact that she was cradling her left arm, wincing the entire while.

"Allow me," Dr. Ka'Leel said, taking hold of the Orion woman's arm.

He then appeared to sadistically twist the wounded appendage, sending Rona into a screaming fit of excruciating pain. Her response (a quite natural even if irrational one) was to slam her fist directly into Ka'Leel's face and send him hurling across the compartment from force of impact. Green, Romulan blood trickled from his nose as he brought himself back to his feet and contorted his face, betraying his efforts to control his homicidal rage.

"Bloodworm!" Rona spat at Ka'Leel and prepared for a fight. "What next, pointed-eared bastard? Will your murder one of us in our sleep?"

"Then apparently bloodworms are smarter than the average Orion! Your arm is broken!" he sneered at Rona. "If I had not set it, you would have been in for a great deal of difficulty."

Though the pain in her arm urged her to fight, Rona felt humbled. Ka'Leel _was_ a doctor after all…a doctor that she had evidently misjudged as much as she had others in her life. Fortunately, she was spared the torture of having to thank him the by sound of a hatch popping.

"Come on," Diamond beckoned from the hatch. "Let's boldly go where no jackass has ever wanted to."

"Are you insane?" Ka'Leel growled. "The atmosphere on this moon is supposed to be made almost entirely of methane!"

"Well. How 'bout that? Yeah, I'll be damned, it is. Guess it's a good thing we crashed into a building then."

"What?" Rona and Ka'Leel asked simultaneously before racing to the hatch.

Indeed they were inside a mammoth structure that had been built upon the surface of Titan. Upon further inspection, the renegades found the air inside to be entirely Earth-like. Magnetic generators and cloaking devices produced interference fields to shield the facility from prying eyes. Replicators and even massive freezer units held fresh food for a crew of hundreds. Everywhere about the compound of buildings, the name United Federation of Planets was plastered, stamped, or carved in plain English. And most disquieting of all…there was not a single living soul to be found.

"I heard rumors about this place," Diamond mumbled with his fingers absent-mindedly upon his lips as they walked around the enormous halls, gawking at the desolate wonderment. "Guys I knew in Starfleet used to talk. Said that there was a secret…kind of a drydock or something somewhere in the Sol system where new ships were being designed. Ships and technology that were supposed to be able to do things you couldn't even imagine. But no one I knew ever really believed in it."

"But where did the crew go?" Springer asked logically.

"Got me," Diamond replied, not so intelligently.

"Diamond!" Rona said excitedly from the turbo lift she had just ridden up on. "You've got to see this, baby!"

It looked like a _Defiant_-class starship; hanging suspended in the air by the anti-gravity units of its drydock/hangar. Diamond and the others wasted no time in boarding her and headed straight to the bridge.

For the first time in years, Lt. Jonathan Diamond found himself on the bridge of a Federation starship. A fully functional one no less, with phaser banks the like that he had never seen before. Indeed, they were a particle beam weapons with a destructive power that was hitherto unknown to him or so it seemed on the consoles. Furthermore, the ship came complete with a cloaking device and the top warp speed was one that Diamond could only calculate as being "pretty damned fast." Even Ka'Leel had to express wonder at the sophistication of the sickbay in his treatment of Rona's arm.

But the _pace de resistance_ of the spaceship was discovered by Kayla in engineering. She immediately called the others to the computer core with all the excitement of Christmas morning.

"They're called Bynars," Kayla said of the two pale and wrinkly skinned alien beings that Kayla had found scurrying and scampering about in engineering, communicating to one another with a rapid series of high-pitched chirps. Upon each of their foreheads was a cybernetic implant, not unlike those seen on the Borg. "They think and speak entirely in binary code. With those implants, they can interface directly with the ship's computer system and increase its efficiency thousands of times over. They also don't seem to pay us much mind."

"So what would you do with all of this?" Rona asked skeptically.

"Isn't it obvious?" Kayla retorted without thinking that she might inspire wrath from the Orion. "This ship is exceptionally fast and maneuverable. It has a cloaking device to avoid detection. It has weaponry of extraordinary destructive power. And this…this 'Bynar-enhanced' computer could make billions of calculations per nanosecond, changing the frequencies of shields and phasers at a rate that no one could hope to keep up with. Folks, this entire ship was built with one purpose in mind: kill Borg."

"And they never got a chance to mass produce it…or perhaps even test it before the Federation fell," Rona added.

The engineering section grew deathly silent as each one of them contemplated what they had just heard. For years they had lived in hiding and in fear from the Borg. Now, seemingly by some unseen divine hand, they hand been given a weapon of unspeakable power to never have to feel that way again.

"Tell me you're thinking what I'm thinking," Dr. Ka'Leel breathed.

"I don't know," Jonathan said genuinely. "What are _you_ thinking?"

"We've found a secure installation that cannot be detected. We have food and supplies for hundreds and we have a starship that was built for no other purpose than to destroy Borg. Get where I'm heading with this?" Ka'Leel ended with an arching of his eyebrow, inviting Diamond to fill in the rest of the blanks.

"Well being an Orion, I for one am certainly no stranger to the life of a pirate…or their strongholds," Rona chimed in.

"We've been over the scout ship already," Kayla said to Diamond of their mode of arrival on Titan. "It's a total loss and the Borg Collective must know that. I doubt they'd see a salvage mission as a rational expenditure of resources."

"Yeah," was all the wittier that the stunned Jonathan Diamond could be.

He returned to the ship's bridge, running over and over in his mind just what this could all come to mean for he and his companions. Once he exited the turbolift and stepped onto the bridge, he noticed that this ship had a plaque on its wall just as the _Andoria_ did.

"TO PROTECT LIFE, TO BETTER THE LIVES OF ALL LIVING THINGS, AND TO ENSURE THAT FREEDOM NEVER PERISHES FROM THIS GALAXY."

"They're not bad ideas," Diamond heard Kayla say as he suddenly noticed that she stood reading the plaque along with him. "I know that you're angry and feel that the directives of the Federation failed you and those you love. But look at it this way: we've got a clean slate now and you've got a chance to really make those ideals work…if you wanted to, that is."

With that she walked away. No, the Federation ideals were not bad, Diamond conceded. Neither were his cohorts. Deep down, they were all just searching; searching for some kind of code of conduct to live by…something that they could still believe in after all that they'd been through…something that could still matter to four people who hadn't given a damn about anything in a long, long time. This was their chance to do it right.

So they went ahead, working towards their common goal without even really discussing it. Ka'Leel trained them in close-quarters combat. Kayla readied the ship for excursions. Rona, her sense of humor peeking through as being sufficiently intact, programmed the replicators to produce rum as homage to the Pirates of the Caribbean. Finally, Diamond gave their ship a name that dovetailed well with his new attitude: the _U.S.S. KIRK_.

"You know we're never going to have our lives back the way they were before everything went to hell in a hand basket," Diamond told them with trademark grimness as he sat at helm onboard the _Kirk_ one day, preparing to embark on the starship's first voyage. "But with a little work, we might actually build new ones that will one day count for things much bigger than ourselves. But for now…" he then cleared the moorings and eased the _Kirk_ forward.

"Let's go hunt some Borg."


End file.
